Next, myself and Sophina Brown joined Alimi Ballard in another room, where we essentially played a videogame – but one very different from the norm, no matter how many First Person Shooters you've played. Two players held a Glock and a Beretta, which we were told by an instructor "Were real guns. Then they put about $6000 of electronics in them." We were taught to treat these as real guns, and needed to reload them in the exact way you would a real gun – the ammo clip would fall from the bottom when the computer said it was empty, and you'd slide it in as if it was a new clip.

Brown and Ballard took part in several different scenarios, interacting with a screen showing filmed footage of the kind of situations police offers might encounter. Used to train real police, this was a very interactive game – The participants had to speak as though they were on the scene, ordering a suspect to do what they wished. Based on what you did, the instructor would then push a button for different conclusions to occur. In the first such situation, Brown and Ballard were in a convenience store, where a man was robbing the clerk. They ordered the man to put his gun down, but he turned on them, firing and they shot, killing him – only for a second assailant, a teenage boy, to shoot and kill them. Their mistake? The "lead officer" (in this case, Ballard) should have had Brown watch the boy, who was seen entering the store at the start of the scenario.

Sophina Brown and Alimi Ballard using the simulator game

Other situations followed, some of them incredibly dramatic. Eventually, Aya Sumika replaced Ballard (who went to take his turn at the shooting range), and she and Brown faced the most outrageous situation yet – a drunken man stumbling through an alley, holding a baby. The women ordered the man to put the baby down, but he didn't listen, and suddenly pulled what looked to be a machete out of his bag – lunging towards the screen, as Sumika and Brown shot their guns at him.

Then it was my turn, and I was paired with Brown, first taking the role of lead officer. Our situations included a domestic disturbance, where another office was assaulted by a man, who we had to shoot when he wouldn't stand down. In another situation, we failed to figure out how to deal with a car crash where one man slowly walked towards us (despite our warnings to stop) while another sat in the passenger seat waving his arm out of the window – only for both of them men to pull guns and shoot us. The instructor told us this was a particularly difficult scenario, because there was only one good shot at the man in the car, and it was through one of the windows of the car. These were definitely situations requiring quick thinking, and when I played the lead officer, I was surprised to find how quickly I got into the role, barking out things like, "Raise your hands immediately!"

Another situation was inside a school, where a shooting occurred. We saw students running from gunfire, and when we entered a classroom, one student was viciously attacking another. When the attacker failed to heed our warnings to stop and looked likely to kill the other student, we shot him – but a close inspection of the scene revealed a gun on the ground, near the guy being attacked, indicating he was the shooter, and the student attacking him had subdued him.

While sometimes amusing because of how heightened they could be, many of the situations were incredibly intense and evocative. As Enrico Colantoni told me, "That simulator in there? Scared the crap out of me. That's what they always talk about. You can spend your whole life at a firing range. Your brain goes somewhere else when it goes into survival mode and you're dealing with somebody firing at you." [Click Here to read my interview with Enrico Colantoni conducted at this event.]

Sumika later told me she felt that this sort of training absolutely helped her when it came to playing an FBI agent, explaining, "I think FBI, cops, that whole world, the relationship that they have with their gun in that professional world… it's at their side their entire career. So I always found it really helpful to go to the gun range and practice and get as comfortable as I possibly can with the gun. Yeah, when you're doing it on set, even though they're blanks, you don't ever want to be scared of your gun, you know? It's not realistic. So I think it definitely helps getting me into character and being confident in the way I hold it and the way you move with it and being aware that you don't point it at anybody, even though it's a fake gun or blanks."